Opera
Opera review: Crying with the heroine in WNO’s Lohengrin
In Act II of Lohengrin, after the villainess Ortrud has interrupted the procession to the Minster, and sown the seeds of doubt in Elsa’s mind about the provenance of her… Read more
Opera: Is Philip Glass' trying to bore his way into immortality?
First nights at English National Opera are, in the main, matters for a sociologist rather than an opera critic. That emphatically wasn’t the case with Wozzeck, but that is an… Read more
Ariadne auf Naxos at Glyndebourne - how can an opera go so wrong?
Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos should be the perfect Glyndebourne opera, not too long, not too demanding, a unique and cunning mixture of seriousness and comedy, plenty to think about… Read more
Opera review: La donna del lago, Dido and Aeneas, The Lighthouse
Rossini’s La donna del lago, based on Sir Walter Scott’s poem, is a relatively late work in his brief and unbelievably industrious period of operatic composition. It has its passionate… Read more
Opera: Wozzeck, Die Zauberflöte
At the close of the first night of Wozzeck at the Coliseum there was a longer dead silence than I can remember after any operatic performance I have been to,… Read more
Joshua, Opera North, Don Carlo, Royal Opera House
Why stage a Handel oratorio, or anyone else’s for that matter? The recent urge to do it, with Bach’s Passions — even, I’m told, with Messiah — suggests a further… Read more
Opera: Maria Miller is a candidate for inclusion in a Dictionary of Political Philistinism; The Answer to Everything; Giulio Cesare
Maria Miller, the new Minister for Culture, Media and Sport, indicated in her first speech on culture that when she hears that word she reaches for her calculator. ‘When times… Read more
Verdi’s Don Carlos is the tops
I go to about half a dozen operas a year, mainly by 19th-century Italian and French composers, plus some Mozart, bits of Handel, Richard Strauss and Britten and, most recently,… Read more
Opera: The Turn of the Screw - review; remembering Sir Colin Davis
The conducting career of Sir Colin Davis, who died a fortnight ago, more than that of most interpretative artists, had the aspect of a personal pilgrimage. Though I had no… Read more
Opera: Der fliegende Holländer and Sunken Garden
Scottish Opera’s new production of The Flying Dutchman, performed in German but advertised in English, is almost a triumph, and very well worth going to see. I reflected, as I… Read more
Kafka Fragments at the Linbury Studio; Nabucco at the Royal Opera House
Yes, well…aphorisms are never easy to deal with, they are a naturally intimidating form of utterance. If you admit that you don’t understand them, you may well be thought thick.… Read more
Agony and ecstasy
For its penultimate HD cinema relay this season the New York Met enterprisingly put on a revival of its production of Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini, with enormous solid sets necessitating… Read more
Reason over passion
This year’s London Handel Festival got under way, as usual, with an opera production at the Royal College of Music’s Britten Theatre. Imeneo, a late opera of Handel, is unusual… Read more
Written on Skin review: sex, murder and cannibalism at the Royal Opera House
George Benjamin’s Written on Skin is a work of compelling fascination, all the more so in that it is elusive and possibly wilfully puzzling. I want to see it again… Read more
Mozart magic
It was some time since I’d been to a performance of Mozart’s greatest though not his deepest opera, Le Nozze di Figaro, one of the works of which I can’t… Read more
Le Nozze di Figaro
I went to two of the most familiar operas in the repertoire this week, one in HD from the New York Met, the other at the Royal Opera. Both were… Read more
Spurned women
I saw three operas this week, all centrally concerned with spurned women. That’s not surprising, given the general subject matter of the art form, but it sometimes makes me wonder… Read more
Double vision
This week has featured new productions at the Royal Opera and English National Opera of staples of the repertoire, both subjected to drastic rethinking. Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is the first… Read more
Blank canvas
I approach any production of Mozart’s last opera, La clemenza di Tito, in a state of acute trepidation: it’s not pleasant sitting bored through nearly three hours of one of… Read more
Addicted to myth
The revival of Harrison Birtwistle’s opera The Minotaur is the most significant artistic event at the Royal Opera since its première, almost five years ago. Unlike Thomas Adès’s more immediately… Read more
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